Originally posted by cdtm
Hey DDM.Were the expressed purposes of the Milgran Experiments a [b]cover story
?The idea of a test to see why Nazi soldiers obeyed their orders is something that would pass less scrutiny, then if the actual purpose of the experiment was to see if people blindly trust medical advice.
Seeing if you blindly trust your doctor would raise a few more eyebrows, then if they only wanted to see if soldiers blindly obey orders to murder civilians.
Because one affects a lot less people then the other, and is less ripe for abuse. [/B]
There were follow-up studies. Here's the summary (unformatted because I'm too lazy):
The author conducted a partial replication of Stanley Milgram’s (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience studies that allowed
for useful comparisons with the original investigations
while protecting the well-being of participants. Seventy
adults participated in a replication of Milgram’s Experiment 5 up to the point at which they first heard the learner’s verbal protest (150 volts). Because 79% of Milgram’s
participants who went past this point continued to the end
of the shock generator’s range, reasonable estimates could
be made about what the present participants would have
done if allowed to continue. Obedience rates in the 2006
replication were only slightly lower than those Milgram
found 45 years earlier. Contrary to expectation, participants who saw a confederate refuse the experimenter’s
instructions obeyed as often as those who saw no model.
Men and women did not differ in their rates of obedience,
but there was some evidence that individual differences in
empathic concern and desire for control affected participants’ responses.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-64-1-1.pdf
I say there are too many variables and relationships are so complicated that they are just replicating the circumstances or situations specific to those studies and they are studying outcomes specific to that study but not the real world.
Other studies that focus on confirmation bias andcognitive ease vs cognitive strain are better measures of "real world outcomes." But trying to study the psychology of authority in any "lab" setting is, in my arrogant opinion, going to end up as science specific to that scenario and not the real world.
The only way to truly study this is to break great amounts of ethics by studying people without their consent.